CCDC to Start Over as 3 Finalists for Post Drop Out of Running

The Centre City Development Corp.’s search to replace Gerald Trimble as head of the high-profile redevelopment agency hit bottom Friday with the announcement that the three finalists for the job are no longer in contention.

As a result, the agency’s board of directors will start anew its hunt for a successor, a process that may take another three months.

The top contender, Frank Taylor, who now heads San Jose’s redevelopment agency, withdrew his name Thursday, citing personal and family reasons. Taylor, in a telephone interview Friday, said, “I felt I had to complete the work I started here . . . and I would have had to be away from my family for a year, and that would have been very tough.”

Taylor has a daughter who will be a high school senior next year, and he said his family would have stayed in San Jose while she finished school. He also was the target of a stay-in-San Jose campaign led by the city’s mayor, Tom McEnery, and the local newspaper, which, in an editorial, pleaded with him not to go.

CCDC chairman John Davies said Taylor is the leading candidate for the job. According to agency spokeswoman Kathy Kalland, Davies said he was “very disappointed because (Taylor) would have made an excellent” administrator.

“Everyone who interviewed him was very impressed,” Davies said, according to Kalland, who spoke to the chairman at the conclusion of a closed-door session held to discuss the hiring situation.

Compounding matters, a second finalist, F. Michael Francis of the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency, removed himself from contention when he informed CCDC officials that he had agreed to take a job as head of the Long Beach Redevelopment Agency, Kalland said.

The third finalist, Gary Stout of St. Paul, Minn., “was no longer under consideration,” Davies said, according to Kalland.

The CCDC board has been working with a consultant to identify qualified candidates for a job that, when held by Trimble, paid $105,300 a year. Trimble left in February to head USC’s new development corporation.